05-14-2008, 05:22 PM
Our organization supports roughly 1000 Macs on campus here and we do not have a campuswide firewall. In the last 15 years, where I have direct experience I have encountered 3 hacked Macs total (because people turned SSH on [it's not on by default and we recommend not enabling it] and easily guessed passwords [very poor judgement]). We haven't seen a single virus infected Mac in more than 8 years and those were from the OS 8 and 9 days - *none* from the OS X days. The majority of these Macs are left on all the time and slept when not in use and we don't have slowdowns from this type of use.
The only trouble we get is from hardware failure (unavoidable), disk errors (DiskWarrior to the rescue), and configuration problems (of all types - network, OS, App, etc., you name it).
Even with our open network, we simply do not have problems due to continuous access to the Internet except for those 3 SSH people and even then, your firewalled router would prevent that from being a problem.
The only trouble we get is from hardware failure (unavoidable), disk errors (DiskWarrior to the rescue), and configuration problems (of all types - network, OS, App, etc., you name it).
Even with our open network, we simply do not have problems due to continuous access to the Internet except for those 3 SSH people and even then, your firewalled router would prevent that from being a problem.